A little honey article for your little one.

Kids just love honey, but they often think that the sweet liquid simply comes from the grocery shops. This article helps adults explain to their little ones (3-6+) what honey really is, where it comes from, and the goodness it brings in a simple language young children would be able to appreciate.

What is honey?
Honey is a sweet syrup bees make for their food. They make honey from the nectar of flowering plants. Nectar is the sweet juice in the centre of a flower. Honey is good for us to eat!

How bees make honey?
Long time ago, people collected honey from the nests which wild bees make in tree holes. Later, people found that bees would bring their nectar to a wooden nest made by humans. This is called a hive.

Bees suck up flower nectar with their long tube called proboscis. At their hive, they hold the nectar in their stomachs. This turns the nectar into a sticky liquid called honey. A special wax called beeswax come from the bodies of bees. Bees shape the beeswax into six-sided cells to form honeycomb. They then put the honey into the honeycomb. They also put beeswax lids on these honeycomb cells to stop the honey from coming out.

Collecting Honey
Most honey is made in big honey farms. People who keep bees for their honey are called beekeepers. They keep their hives near the flower fields.

Bees mostly make honey in spring and summer when there are lots of flowers. They eat some of this honey and keep the rest in their nests for winter. Bees make much more honey than they need so beekeepers can take a lot of the honey for people to eat. Beekeepers collect honey in the spring. They wear special clothes to protect themselves from bee bites. They take the honeycombs out from the hives. Before they can get the honey, they have to scrape the beeswax lids off the honey comb. This is called uncapping.

A special machine called an extractor takes the honey out of the honeycombs. The machine spins the honeycombs around very fast to make all the honey come out. The honey is then passed through a net with tiny holes to make it clean and clear. The honey drips through the holes and any small bits of beeswax are left in the net. Machines pour the liquid honey into jars. Lids are put on the jars to keep the honey fresh. Labels on the jars tell the people who are going to buy what kind of honey is in the jar. Every year, beekeepers sell millions and millions of jars of honey.

Different Kinds of Honey
There are hundreds of different kinds of honey in the world. The colour, taste, and smell of honey depend on the kind of flowers the bees visit. Every kind of flower has a different nice smell. When bees make honey from a type of flower, this nice smell becomes part of the honey. Liquid honey is cooled in a special way to make it thick and creamy. You can spread cream honey on bread or toast like butter. You can also use it as a topping for yoghurt or pudding.

Honey is Good for You
Honey is a carbohydrate. This means it is a kind of food that gives us energy to walk, run, think and play. Honey contains vitamins. Vitamins help to keep us healthy. Honey is very good for us, so it is used in lots of things we buy in the shops. People use honey in breakfast cereal, cakes, biscuits, barbeque meats, and even shampoos and cough medicines.

By Tan R.

http://www.benefits-of-honey.com

All Copyrights Reserved. 2006

Tan R. is the owner of the website

http://www.benefits-of-honey.com

[tags]benefits of honey, honey facts, bees honey facts, health benefits of honey, kids and honey bees[/tags]

‘Who put the boys in the club house? You did, baby, you did.’

The song ‘Keep a Lid on Things’ by the Crash Test Dummies sums it up. Psychiatric rehabilitation organisations are often there to simply keep a lid on things (clients’ behaviour) rather than to get them back in the mainstream of society. Their stated aims are often vastly different from the actual outcomes.

Does the ghetto keep you sick? So it seems. Last year an Australian research team interviewed people who had bipolar disorder, and one of the findings was stunningpeople who did not use psychiatric rehabilitation services tended to stay well longer than those who did*.

If you’re coming out of a bipolar crisis, perhaps just out of hospital, it’s worth questioning the value of rehabilitation. If the only place you go is the mental health clinic, you surround yourself with others who are sick. It becomes comfortable, you make friends, there’s no challenge, and you will find over time that you become nervous about venturing into mainstream activities, like ringing up about a job, or going back to your sporting club. The longer you are inside the ghetto the harder it is to break out. Your confidence disappears. People share stories of being victimised and discriminated against and this shores up your growing sense that it’s too hard ‘out there’. You conclude you should stay in rehab.

The religion editor of my city’s broadsheet wrote this last month:

‘Victimhood is a bad address. It’s a dangerous and delusory place and definitely the wrong side of the tracks. Unfortunately, far too many people live there.

Even if you really are a victim, you have to move out. Victimhood offers an odd but counterfeit comfort, where nothing is your own responsibility, where life is something that is done to you by others, and is beyond your control, yet you can enjoy the moral high ground… It’s a short step from victimhood to paranoia.’**

Zwartz was writing about race riots in Sydney, but these words resonated with my experience of the mental health lobby. Victimhood leads to a sense of futility, a wariness that prevents fair assertion of our wishes. Countless so-called advocacy organizations work in the short term, never daring to jeopardize their funding by pursuing the big picture, the dream.

‘Consumer’ organizations fare no better. Consumer organizations are beset with ineptitude not because of illness, nor because of lack of skills and intelligence. The one thing that undoes the political work of consumer organizations is the prevalence of victimhood. These organizations include many people who have been actually victimized, but too many are stuck in the ghetto and exhibit ongoing ‘victim behavior’. If you cast yourself as a victim, your requests will never be taken seriouslyyou’re too easy to say ‘no’ to.

I believe this is a reason that mental health funding around the developed world is far lower than funding for the equivalent level of burden of disease in general health. For example, In Australia it is only 8% of the total health budget compared with the OCED average of 12%.

SANE Australia reported last year that stigma was the villain of the piece, and produced startling evidence to support the view.

In Australia there have been eight State or national inquiries in the last twelve years. Each time puny progress is made but the underlying flaw (lack of funding) is perpetuated. As Einstein supposedly said: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ We need to do something different. Here is my suggestion:

Get out of the ghetto and into the mainstream.

Do stuff that doesn’t involve mental health.

When you have gotten rid of your victim outlook, start demanding fair funding for mental health in your country. Follow up, don’t take no for an answer, and incite all your friends and relations to do the same.

If your consumer organisation has a victim outlook, you could try to change it, but expect resistance. People can be codependent on their organizations.

*Russell, S J and Browne, J L ‘Staying well with bipolar disorder’ Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2005; 39:187-193.

**Barney Zwartz, The Age, Melbourne Australia 15 December 2005

Madeleine Kelly is the author of the award-winning book Bipolar and the Art of Roller-coaster Riding (Two Trees Media ISBN 0-646-44939-7). More information about managing bipolar disorder can be found at http://beatbipolar.com

[tags]bipolar, manic depressive, depression, funding, mental health[/tags]

The Health Savings Account (HSA) is an amazing tool that a lot of people have been talking about. It is meant to help you save money on insurance and make your life simpler, maybe even help you be healthier.

But do HSAs work just as well for older Americans? The answer depends on your age.

Let’s start with someone older than 65. Once you turn 65, you are eligible for Medicare, and that means you can no longer contribute to an HSA. If you had an HSA before you turned 65, a very interesting thing happens.

The HSA, which was basically an account that could only be used for medical expenses, suddenly becomes an Individual Retirement Account (IRA). It instantly changes status when you turn 65.

This is a very intriguing concept for all of us who are younger than 65. You already know that there is no “use it or lose it” condition for an HSA. You keep accumulating that money forever, you do not lose it at the end of each year.

So, if you’re not sick very often, you may accumulate a lot of money in the HSA. Then, once you turn 65, you can start pulling money out of it each year as income. Your withdrawals are taxable, but won’t it be nice to have another stream of income when you retire. Think of it as your “Healthy Life Reward Account.” The healthier you are in your life, the more money you’ll have left in your HSA. It could be tens of thousands of dollars!

If you are over 55 but younger than 65, you get even more benefits for your HSA. You are eligible for something called “catch up contributions.” This means that you can put more money into this tax-deferred account than those of us under 55.

In 2005, you can put $600 more than you health insurance policy deductible, and the amount of that catch-up contribution increases every year until it hits $1,000 in 2009. If I were you, I’d take good advantage of those catch-up contributions. Tax-deferrals are always nice to have when tax time comes around.

Daryl Kulak is the author of the book “Health Insurance Off the Grid – A Wonderful Way to Use Alternative Medicine and Save Money on Insurance Using the New Health Savings Account (HSA).” The book provides a nine-step plan to get your self-employed or small business health insurance costs under control using a unique approach you won’t find anywhere else. The book is available for sale as an e-Book or paperback at the Website http://www.healthoffthegrid.com